Mike Zielinski, also known as Zeke, offers his entertaining and insightful take on politics, sports and topical events. Zeke has been a prolific and creative sports columnist, news columnist, blogger and wordsmith with a lifelong love affair with prose.

With the middle class vanishing in America, products lines target the rich and poor

Remember the good old days when everybody smoked cigarettes, nobody wore seat belts, English wasn’t a foreign language, and there was an actual middle class alive and well in America?

With the middle class becoming dinosaur extinct, corporations as well as the good ladies of the evening are noticing the prosperity gap and scaling back their middle-market product lines.

The richest percent of Americans control 84 percent of the wealth, and the 400 richest Americans have a higher net worth than the full bottom 50 percent of households.

Little wonder that manufacturers such as Procter & Gamble, the household-goods giant responsible for everything from Charmin and Old Spice to Tide, are concentrating their efforts on luxury and bargain items, and putting less emphasis on products targeting the disappearing middle class.

So the rich may put their pants on one leg at a time like you and me (or is it I? — grammar teachers please check in), but they do use a better grade of toilet paper. Of course, those fabulously elite 400 wealth barons likely use hundred-dollar bills instead.